This invention relates to an improvement in telecommunications systems.
Many organizations gather and distribute information in the course of telephone calls serviced at least, in part, by members of a staff of attendants. Such organizations include major corporations which conduct television or other media advertising campaigns to encourage customers and potential customers to call the organization via a telephone number that is toll free to the caller. The area code "800" is used in the United States for such toll-free telephone numbers.
The systems described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,837,799 and 4,907,260 and prior U.S. application Ser. No. 07/362,038 provide numerous advantages in their ability to route incoming calls onto outgoing lines on the public switched network to attendants who can be working at a remote location such as a regional call center or who are telecommuters working at home. A network of remote agents can be established to which calls can be quickly routed.
The aforementioned systems provide for the remote agents to interact with the systems to perform various functions, such as signaling the supervisor for help, etc. This is done through inband signals generated by the remote agents using the DTMF keys on their telephones. If a remote agent in a conversation with a caller needs to perform a system function, he can use his DTMF keys to generate the inband signals needed. But to generate DTMF tones in the middle of a conversation will subject the other party to the irritation of hearing those DTMF tones.
It is desirable to prevent the caller in a conversation with a remote agent from hearing the DTMF tones generated by the remote agent. It is also desirable to prevent an unauthorized party to a conversation from either accidentally or intentionally initiating system functions.
Once a telecommunications path for a conversation has been established by a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) or an ACD (Automatic Call Distributor), those systems do not have the ability to detect and respond to inband signaling during a conversation. This is due to the fact that most locally attached users of such systems have dedicated function keys on their proprietary telephones. The dedicated function keys on such phones use either out-of-band signaling or a separate signaling path to activate system features.
Many telecommunications systems, such as automated attendants and voice mail systems provide callers with interactive DTMF capabilities to enable them to perform various functions. A voice mail system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,371,752 to Matthews, et al., entitled "Electronic Audio Communication System." It provides callers with the ability to store and retrieve audio messages using inband signaling from telephones. An automated attendant type of system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,696,028 to Morgantein, et al., entitled "PBX Intercept and Caller Interactive Attendant Bypass System." Such automated attendants are used with PBX switching systems to intercept incoming calls to allow callers to reach called parties without the assistance of a switchboard attendant. The callers use the DTMF keys on their telephones to enter the extension number of the desired party.
In the use of automated attendants and voice mail systems, callers interact with recorded announcements and use DTMF tones to perform various functions. The use of DTMF tones to interact with these systems does not take place while a conversation between two people is in progress.
It is desirable to enable users of various types of telecommunications systems to be able to transparently signal those systems during a conversation to activate system features and functions, without disturbing the other party in the conversation.